


Present Perfect

by chaila



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-25
Updated: 2010-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-12 04:45:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/120953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaila/pseuds/chaila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The present perfect verb tense designates action which began in the past but which continues into the present or the effect of which continues into the present. River, River/Doctor</p>
            </blockquote>





	Present Perfect

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted [here](http://chaila43.livejournal.com/106342.html) on LJ.

Time happens all at once. River has understood this for almost as long as she can remember.

Most people think in terms of space— _somewhere_ —but River thinks in terms of time and _sometime_. It's easy to grasp that all of space exists at the same time. Everyone understands that things are happening everywhere even if you can't see them. River knows that all of time also exists at once and you can move through it more easily than going from place to place.

Unlike time, motion through space can be a matter of perspective. You can ignore the slow creep of a planet on its orbit, observe only your immediate surroundings and choose to remain at a single point in space. Time has never worked that way.

***

On her ninth birthday, her aunt gave her a book. "It's a very, very old book. It was written thousands of years ago," she told River, "in the 20th century. That's how you know it's a good one. It lasted."

" _A Wrinkle in Time_ ," River read. She scrunched up her nose. "How can time be wrinkled?"

"Read it and see," her aunt said, and dropped a kiss on the top of River's head.

River spent many maddening hours in subsequent months laying on her bed with her eyes closed, trying to imagine what five dimensions looked like. Sometimes, if she concentrated really hard, it made sense just for a second.

When her friends played make believe planets, River played make believe time, jumping from the past to the future as easily as the other children ran from place to place. They traveled with their feet on the ground. River flew.

She still couldn't picture what five dimensions looked like, but flying, she decided, must be what it felt like. She made the swing fly as high as it could go before she jumped off, sailing through the past and future but ending up exactly where she started. Her sister screamed every time she let go at the peak of the arc, but River wasn't scared.

***

When she first meets the Doctor, it's like meeting someone who speaks her language, though it's several years before he teaches her how to write it.

"I thought you'd be younger," he says once he's convinced she really doesn't know him, a process that had involved some rather tangled verbal sparring and him chasing her around in circles in the dirt. Now they're inside the temporary shelter that passes for her office on the dig.

She cases him from head to toe. "Sometime," she says with a smirk, "I am."

His frantic pacing ceases for a moment and he smiles at her like he knows her, reaches a hand halfway across the space between them and drops it again. "Yes."

It's unsettling. "Do I know you?" she asks him for the fifth time.

"Yes. Well, no. No, apparently not right this minute. But you will. You have."

"I don't remember you."

"No, of course you don't," he says, suddenly exasperated. "Not right _now_. But you have."

"You're mad," she says, and prepares to throw him out of her office.

"Of course I am. I'm a time-traveler," he says, backing away from her until he's against the wall. "And so are you. You know me in your future. You haven't met me yet, but you will. Well, you are right now, I suppose. I'm the Doctor. Lovely to meet you, River Song. Now you've met me. You see?" he asks, like it's the most straightforward thing in the universe.

Of course, she does see.

He tells her about the TARDIS then, speaking very quickly and still against the wall with his hands out of in front of him, like he's holding her off until he can say it all. She listens and studies his face. "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space," he finishes, "Bigger on the inside."

"Time?" she asks. "Relative dimensions? A time machine?"

"Now you're listening," he says cheekily.

She considers him. He has an irritatingly knowing smile, a smudge of dirt on his nose and a time machine.

She lets him stay.

***

It's a common misconception that archaeology is about dead planets and old dirt, in keeping with the simple understanding of time as a straight line, once past, never to return. To River, it's about time: _arkhaīos_ , _archaiologia_ , ancient. It's the study of the passage of time and the many different routes time can take as it passes.

She has wanted to be an archaeologist since she told her teacher on career day that she wanted to be a time-traveler. Her teacher told her that wasn't really an occupation and pointed her toward the books spread on the table for research. River sat down with one about various social science disciplines.

"Archaeology," the book read, "provides a window through time. It is primarily the study of the human past. However, what we currently call the human past will eventually cover a vast spectrum of time. With recent advances in time travel, much more of this spectrum has become observable and certain modern branches of the discipline have begun to apply archaeological methods to the study of the human future."

River stole that page of the book. Wrinkled and worn, it's still tucked between the pages of the book her aunt gave her when she was nine.

***

It has always seemed such a waste to River, all the time happening when she's not there to see it.

After their third meeting, he asks her, haltingly, to stay, to travel with him in the TARDIS for awhile. She kisses him for an answer, laughing against his lips about how people say rubbish like "time stopped" at moments like these. She feels time rush past, around and between them, reaches out to touch him, and it, alive beneath her hands.

From then on, she has a flat in the 51st century near the university, a cottage in the 68th on Andura for when she wants the quiet, and a bedroom on the second level, usually, of an old blue box, but she lives—has lived—in time, all at once.

***

River has long kept a journal, really a logbook of sorts. It's not a matter of remembering, but recording. An archaeologist's habit. Events and discoveries are useless if they cannot be read and dissected, shown to others, and related to other events witnessed and written down by other researchers in other times. Each line becomes a piece of the puzzle of human history, collectively linked together.

When she starts traveling with the Doctor, she begins to record their meetings and travels in a different book, separate from the one she uses for other expeditions and discoveries. A journal, she decides, is professional, but a diary is a personal thing.

She writes her own time onto its pages, each line a part of a puzzle to which he has half the pieces, a private universe she can't see the whole of yet.

***

After their fifth meeting she knows sometime she has loved him.

They make rules.

"There'd be no point in this," he says one afternoon when they're curled up in the library, "if we worry about what might have already happened next time we meet."

"We won't talk about the future," she agrees. It's been an unspoken rule since they met. It means they don't make plans, which suits River just fine. It's futile to try to plan for a future when time is always shifting between them.

"Or the past," he points out. "The next time we meet might be a few thousand years ago." She laughs with the joy of that and pushes him back against the pillows.

"And you can't let me see the book," he persists with a studied lightness, coiling and uncoiling a lock of her hair.

"No peeking," she agrees and leans in as if to kiss him. "It's only a little about you anyway," she whispers in his ear instead. "A few chapters, here and there."

***

It's half a million years later when she knows she loves him in her present.

She and her team are almost finished with the nearby excavation of the Valhallan ruins. She hadn't particularly needed him for anything, but she'd wanted him so she'd asked. He'd come, like he always does. He's a little earlier in his timeline than she'd wanted, but he knows her.

They're in a field near the site, somewhere in the 1,700th century, his head resting on her thigh as she sits on the ground studying the prize of the expedition. There are several newly discovered planets around this time period, occupied long ago by apparently highly advanced civilizations that lasted a mysteriously short amount of time.

"A million years old," she says, holding the object up and examining it in the starlight. The small, heavy stone holds the key to decoding at least five different written languages spoken on multiple planets in this system, and probably several more they don't know about yet. She had expected it to be larger, all that knowledge, but it fits in the palm of her hand.

"That's relative," he says. "A million years in its personal timeline. Do rocks have a timeline?"

"Of course they do." She ignores his flippancy. "It's not a rock, sweetie. It's one of the Constants of Asgard. It's lasted a million years."

"A space rock," he says, bored, as usual, with the archaeology. "Seems an awful lot of trouble. Though, hang on, I hear Asgard is a lovely place for a picnic, if you go at the right time," he attempts to distract her. She knows he thinks he could tell her everything she wants to know about this system, its inhabitants and their culture, the languages they spoke, the lives they lived, why they died, but he doesn't. That's her rule. It would be a pale imitation of discovering it for herself.

"We could go there," he says when she doesn't reply, anticipating her thoughts. "Go here. Back then. Or to Asgard."

"Mmm," she hums absently, still studying the markings on the stone. She'll certainly need to go to both places at multiple times in the next phase of her research. She mentally makes plans. "Later," she evades, changing the subject and slipping the stone into her pocket as she moves to lay beside him.

The stars in the sky look so much closer than they do when she's on her own planet in her own time, so much more within reach. It's an unscientific comparison to make. It's been a long time since she star-gazed there and more than just her planetary perspective has changed since then. She's in an unexplored system in the 1,700th century and the future is ancient history in her hand.

She's restless with the thrill of discovery. She props herself up on her elbow to look at him. His eyes are closed. He's quiet tonight, for him. Usually the millennia fly rapidly out of order across the changeable expressions of his face, readable only in pieces; a gust of a 27th century Peladon storm when he's angry, a single beat of an unnamed planet in the 85th when he's sad, a glimmer of a 68th century Anduran island when she makes him laugh. It's easier to read the time in his face when he's still like this. She smooths her palm over his forehead and he smiles slowly. She files the calm expression away: 1,700th century Valhalla.

"If time happens all at once," she voices her thought, her fingers against his cheek, the weight of ancient civilizations in her pocket, "Every moment lasts forever."

"That's very philosophical, Doctor," he murmurs.

"This moment," she says as the thought spins out, "will last forever."

He opens his eyes to look at her, more serious now. It almost makes him look his age. "Pity we can't stay."

She smiles, tugs lightly on his bow tie, presses a kiss against his temple. "And where," she says, "would be the fun in that?"


End file.
